


twist the sinews of thy heart

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [292]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Feanor copes with grief very badly, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, New York City, Paranoia, So does Maedhros, Spying, a bit of a...Silm Noir, but before Finrod's return, set after Finwe's death, some violence, title from William Blake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26195938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: If Maedhros is to serve, he cannot wholly profess the faith. If he is to do what he must, and learn the face beneath that unassuming bowler, he cannot believe that Melkor Bauglir is the hand that winds fate.(Feanor has different ideas.)
Relationships: Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fingon | Findekáno & Maedhros | Maitimo, Finwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Maedhros | Maitimo & Maglor | Makalaurë
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [292]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1. in the forests of the night

Fingon is as good as his word.

Summer fades, and with it times of prayer and fasting; with it the sharp blade of church-bell farewells. Liquor dulls pain, as it has done for half his unhappy half-life, and makes its own anew. Indeed, for his part, Maedhros was not as good as his word—and the old priest would be ashamed of him. He broke his month’s hard fast of bread and water with both good and evil on his tongue.

The good was for Fingon—Fingon who, with a renewed promise of friendship, returned to his old ways of advising a course of soups and vegetables and tender poultry cuts, even if he no longer took to the kitchen himself. Maedhros makes such exceptions before his little god, and eats whatever Fingon bids him eat. Fingon is as good as his word, but he is a man of the world now after his own fashion, and Maedhros cannot afford to vex him in their time together.

At night, with no such guide, Maedhros bows to his devils, and drinks.

(But that, too, is for someone. It is for Athair. Athair, who vanished north like a dead man himself.)

Athair has left him nothing to do. No directive; not even a harsh word.

What is left is strictly appearances. Everything else is an empty vessel.

Appearances must be kept up for Fingon; vessels are hidden in the dark. Hidden from Maglor, too, for Maglor is made passionate and anxious by Maedhros’ profligacy, and Maedhros has reason to fear the occurrence of a slip of wit or wariness on his brother’s part.

Such slips have turned deadly, of late.

Maedhros, thus, is grown cautiously mechanical in his vices. He drinks only his room, then sleeps it away to a headache. He does not seek out women, either among his acquaintance or for pay. He bathes his face and body, scrubs his teeth twice daily, and never drinks overmuch where he shall be discovered or suspected.

Yet the prosperity of these methods is seen by few—fewer than ever before. The invitations that were a diversion or a danger in earlier days (days in which Finwe lived) have scattered like leaves in the wind. With Finwe gone, and tragedy and old scandals left leaking from the family register, no stylish set has further use for Maedhros Feanorian. He is obliged to sit stiff and clean in his own house, waiting for Maglor to return from his musical ventures. Otherwise, he meets Fingon out of doors, or takes food and drink at one of the smoky gentlemen’s clubs.

Whenever Maglor is gone for many hours, Maedhros must beg his great God, the one with mercy for others only, that Maglor _shall_ return, and shall not die at the same hand as—

(When he drinks heavily before sleeping, he does not dream.)

“I shall be going away for a little while,” Fingon announces, the first week of September. They are lunching together, and Maedhros is almost hungry today. Fingon is watching him like a hawk and pretending not to, over plates of chicken salad and shepherd’s pie, and Maedhros is pathetically appreciative of such attention.

His childish pleasure is chased away by the words.

“Going away?” he echoes. A thought of Finrod flits to mind. Finrod, companion long-buried in memory if not in fact—for of course Finrod has been gone for the two years that shattered life and love the most—

“Two weeks at most,” Fingon says cheerfully, with the remote twinkle in his steady gaze that suggests fond amusement born of weathered concern. “I daresay it shall not be longer. Washington has some of the nation’s foremost medical minds, and though you know I don’t give a fig for that, Madame Nienna of the Columbian College _is_ first-rate in my truest opinion.”

“Ah, yes,” Maedhros says. “You’ve been there before.”

“Indeed I have.” Fingon’s gaze shifts away at that; distance, not shame. “It feels like an age. Olorin is keen on developing our own answer to the Shattuck Report. New York’s public health isn’t just a concern during plagues or riots, you know.”

“Godspeed to you,” Maedhros tells him, feeling sick. It is in Fingon’s generous nature to care for others’ ills, beyond his family’s griefs. Maedhros cannot remember when he himself last spared a moment’s concern for anyone who did not share his blood. And that circle has shrunk, too, with his grandfather gone.

Indis is not blood. Fingolfin…

“You…” Fingon’s honest features twitch a little. But of course. Fingon’s blood-cares are a burden to him, at least as far as Maedhros is concerned, whether he knows it or not. On the heels of his eager announcement, he must feels obliged to ask,

_Will you be well?_

This is so close to pity, for them. Closer than they ever dreamed of being, not so long since.

“You will miss a flurry of autumn fetes,” Maedhros says airily, pushing back his plate. “You know how society always rushes forward with renewed vigour, once the fatigues of summer retrench.”

“I have never been fond of parties.” Fingon lays his coins on the table. “But I would be happy to think of you moving in society. I do not…whatever standards of mourning…it is _most_ important that we heal.”

“You are right,” Maedhros agrees, without saying at all what he agrees to. As one might tease the scab of a wound, he is toying with a comparison of awful prospects: is it more terrible to imagine himself in company, gay and cavalier, or to imagine that Fingon thinks he _wants_ that diversion?

They leave the table and move briskly along September streets.

“I shall be late,” says Maglor. Grief has not ruined Maglor, though Maedhros knows it has touched him. Maglor weeps easily in ordinary life, and so, upon the coming of a tragedy, his heart vents by means other than mere tears. Maglor’s songs are grief, and his poems are grief, and his touches upon the piano key or the fiddle string are grief flown free of bitterness.

“Is it another concert?” Maedhros asks. If it is, he has forgotten it entirely—and that is exactly opposite to his aim of precise knowledge about Maglor’s whereabouts.

Maglor shakes his head. Smiles, even. “No, it is something more…it is an intimate gathering.”

_Vengeance…it was vengeance that struck the blow. No one bears a grudge against Maglor. Remember that._

“Very well,” Maedhros answers, then lies: “I shall not wait up.”

Every carriage rattling by; every tossed-up stone; every flicker of candlelight on the high walls: they have voices.

Too early to be Maglor, a key turns in the lock of the front door.

Maedhros was not sleeping—he is _sure_ that he was not sleeping—but his mouth is sour and his eyes are bleary. He jolts up from his chair, and dashes to the hall, and even those strides remind him overmuch of the deer that run madly towards Celegorm’s blind, not away.

“Maedhros.”

He slumps. Fear, revulsion, shame, relief. Those belong to him, and he belongs to—

“Athair,” he says. “Athair, how came you here?”

“By coach,” Athair says crisply, shedding his coat. The gloss of a light rain is on his hair.

The maid has gone to bed, the cook comes only by day. Therefore, the house is all but empty, save for them. Yet Maedhros makes no move to embrace his father. It is not his place. Not since…not since Athair, too, became fatherless. Not since Maedhros betrayed Athair, many months before that.

Their history has grown so cruel. It shocks and numbs at once.

“You are very welcome,” Maedhros says. “Maglor is…not at home.”

Athair is less alarmed by this than one might expect. He makes for the sitting room, and Maedhros follows. “Busy with his music?”

“Yes. He said it was an intimate gathering. There will not be much exposure.”

“Do you think him in danger?” Athair demands, with a sidelong glance over his shoulder that Maedhros cannot easily decipher. “Do you think… _Maglor_ …in danger?”

“I don’t know, sir.” He swallows. “We know so little.”

“Do we? A terrible pity, that.” Athair takes up his favored chair, crosses his legs, and rests his hands against his knee. It is a favorite pose of his when he is angry, but Maedhros does not see anger in him—or at least, Maedhros does not know what he sees. 

“Is everyone well at home?”

“I would not have left them if they were not.”

“Of course not.” Maedhros sits awkwardly, and resists the temptation to twist his hands together.

Athair fidgets. “In truth, I think enough time has passed that we may all claim a little false comfort. The papers are forgetting us, you see. His false friends are forgetting us.”

Maedhros chews his tongue. His tears are worse than Maglor’s, these days; it is all he can do to stem their tide at inopportune moments.

Athair continues, without expecting a word from him, “None but one hated him enough, Maedhros. Whatever slander they offered on their ungrateful tongues—that he turned a blind eye to the wiles of Protestants, that he consorted with nativists, when you and I know that if he _had_ a fault it was in seeing people _too clearly_ , such that he trusted in his own powers to persuade—”

“I know,” Maedhros whispers. “I know.”

“And yet they believe a common thug with his mouth stitched to his flask, with never enough money to fill it—they believe that he was anything more than a prop? They believe he _knew_ Finwe well enough to plot against him? To find out where he lived, and to wait, and—”

Maedhros asks, faintly, “Was it any secret where he lived?”

Athair scoffs. “I do not expect a Five Points drunkard to learn it easily. The entire affair reeks of conspiracy, and pointed hatred. A warning! A warning to _me_.”

Maedhros’ ears pound.

“ _They_ will hate the Irish forever,” Athair says, speaking of all other men. “But they will not kill us one by one! They will rise against us in numbers, as they did in Philadelphia six years ago. Think, Maedhros, of how they treat those whom they enslave. Think of how they are supremely confident in the permanence of that bondage, only to justify brutality against sudden rises in _power_ , whenever black or native or Irish souls rise up to face them in humanity.” He pounds one fist against his knee. “What power had Athair? He was old—he had stepped away—he left no _legacy_ on the Council, as once we’d hoped—”

It is difficult to breathe.

“Only one would not be satisfied. I have escaped too many nets, you see. _He_ has escaped his. He wishes to face me, I am sure of it—and I am a fatherless son, a brotherless brother, a metalsmith who shall never be greater than a farm-forge. That is what he _pretends_ , and that is what he has endeavored to make with all his might, but there is much he does not know. Will never know.”

Even without the utterance of names, Maedhros knows that they have left Finwe behind. That Athair speaks now of what lives under the earth, what burrows there, without needing to be buried. Fear sings in his veins at the thought; at the knowledge. It always does.

“Mark me,” Athair says. “This was the first move in a score of them. First the wound. Then the infection. He will obtain enough poison to leave me burning and retching.” His voice shakes. It could be fear. It could be anger. It could, Maedhros supposes miserably, be grief.

Maedhros waits. He always waits, when he has his wits about him—and sometimes, when he does not, he is stricken to stillness rather than spurred to action. This is a time such as this.

 _I shall be going away_ , the memory of Fingon says.

“He hated Athair for his heart,” Athair says, “And me for my mind. Thus he took my heart—by means of Athair’s head.”

A strangled, childish sound escapes Maedhros’ lips. Mercifully, Athair does not heed it.

 _Blood and brain_ —

“This is not a matter of thugs loitering at street corners,” Athair says, more calmly. “This is why we need not fear for _Maglor’s_ safety. What good is a boy to Bauglir? His attacks are surgical. I believe…I will believe with more than faith itself…that he saw. Damn him!”

Maedhros, waiting, should say nothing more than, _what can I do?_

“You can’t be serious, Athair.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

Maedhros is looking down at him…Maedhros has, without knowing it, leapt to his feet. He sits down, tightening his trembling hands on the arms of the chair. Imagines them bound there, so as to steady himself. “I only mean…I mean if it is—if it is _him_ , then wouldn’t he be all the more eager to get at you…through us? Through Maglor, that is. He is so often in society. And so talented…you always said _he_ envied your talent…”

Athair’s eyes blaze. “You make a strange play at loyalty,” he says. “Such concern for your brothers—as if I have not considered the chances of reprisal! As if I have not personally ensured that each of Maglor’s connections are reputable and trustworthy! As if the conventions of mourning do not forbid him from entering balls and parties this season! As if I did not arrange his conveyance to be privately provided by the livery across the way, under the pretense of safe transport for his instruments, when in fact I orchestrated all with his safety in mind!”

“I did not know that, sir.”

“No, you did not. There is much you are ignorant of. Much we now cannot understand between us, without a good deal of hard work and time yet ahead. Your friendship with Fingon ought to have given us insight into his father’s doings, but it has not. Your education at the Council ought to have given us a vantage point to observe the whereabouts of snakes and silk-gloved robbers, but it did not.”

“Athair—”

“I am not angry with you, Maedhros. I cannot be angry with _you_ , when his body is in the ground.” Athair’s hand jerks upward, covering his eyes for a long, dragging moment. It is as if he knows that his face is too terrible to look upon.

“What can I do?” Maedhros whispers. Athair is so close—so very close. He could reach out and touch his knee, or better yet, Maedhros could fall to _his_ knees. Could pray to Athair, who isn’t a god, but burns most fiercely, somehow, of them all.

Tobacco is not his pleasure. His head aches with the smoke of it, and he sips his brandy slowly, staving off the worst pain with the heel of one hand pressed against his brow. He is horribly lonely, and thus he craves all that is wrong and comforting. Better brandy than this; better company than this.

It is been so long since he has lain with a woman, if one is counting in Sundays (which is how he generally counts his worst sins—the ones that prick him horribly at Mass—). He should not miss such a sin, but he does. He wanted then and there, as he wants now, to prove himself, and they always were willing to let him, affectionate and imperious by turns. He wants to be scolded and praised, ordered and held. He wants not think for himself, if he can help it, for the rest of his life.

He wants to be lost in oblivion rather than black-smoked suspicion. 

( _Let us race to discover what we can_ , said Athair wryly. _Learn what you can of the confessed scoundrel, who sits languishing in a cell with nothing to admit but his crime. Prove to me that it was a feat of public bad opinion, and I shall grieve my father as a statesman with all the rest._ )

Before the summer’s tragedy, he came often to Bernard’s, to lounge against worn velveteen and leather, to thumb the tarnished gilt edges of playing cards. (Always, of course, he came to drink.) It is not that he expects to hear news of the convict Jack Byrne here—the man would not have moved in such a circle, even as a waiter or a groom—but Maedhros does his best thinking when he cannot escape the eyes of strangers. Among family, he is too tender-hearted…too weak.

 _And yet you have sat alone for half-an-hour, drowning._ He drains his glass, and rouses himself from his stupor of bleak desires. He must join a game. He must talk and smile. Then, he shall mean business.

When he rises, a sudden movement catches his eye. A man in the corner seat, still be-hatted though they are indoors, ducks his head low.

For several rounds, Maedhros wins and loses in a friendly fashion. A few men know him well enough to offer their condolences; to say that they are glad to have him among their number again. He hears Finwe called _a good man_ , and does not break under the weight of those words.

Not before their eyes, at least.

(How many lives and loves would have to be stripped away before he could be free to end his own existence? The beautiful silence of death could be his, were it not for Maglor…Fingon…Mother… _Athair_ …)

(Oh, were it not for _all_ of them!)

Evening is closing in when he takes his leave. He distributes his coins to the children who beg on street corners. He cannot meet their eyes, but he smiles at them. Each thin-voiced plea stings sharply.

The lanterns are his only guide when he notes, for the second time, that footsteps are whispering steadily behind him.

He can hold his own in a fight. If someone has seen him being free with his purse, that may explain the trailing interest. But when he slips around a corner and casts a glance back into the yellow glow, he sees the same hat he remarked upon at Bernard’s.

Maedhros does not breathe deeply again until the door at Valinor Park is bolted shut behind him—and this, an hour later than expected, because he has wound so much about.

“Good lord,” says Maglor sleepily. “Where have you been? You’ve a look of seven devils about you.”

Maedhros must gaze greedily at him for a swift span of seconds. To do more—to take his brother in his arms as they did when they were children, or as they did the night before Grandfather was laid in the ground—would be to rob Maglor of his remaining innocence.

(Maedhros knows he is trembling from head to toe.)

_But for that copper mane, you favor your grandmother, lad._ Grandfather’s eyes had been misty. _Those are your bones._

If anyone were inclined to follow the house of Finwe, would they not sooner look to Fingolfin? To—God forbid—Fingon? _They_ had Grandfather’s dark hair and square, proud features. Unless, of course, an enemy knew…knew that Maedhros had once attended Council meetings and pressed his hand against a hundred others. Knew that Finwe’s eldest grandson had once been destined for great things. Common wastrels might be ignorant, it was true, but many, many men beyond the lantern-eyed shadow of the past could have dwelt with vengeance on the salience of Feanorian ambitions.

_Please, God. Forgive me for defying him but—_

_I cannot believe—_

Athair so readily dismissed the prospect that Jack Byrne could have accomplished a proper assassination. Who was Maedhros to contradict him? At any rate, Athair was using _his_ time at Valinor Park as privately as Maedhros was obliged to use his own, disappearing for long hours without so much a word escaping his lips as to purpose. Maedhros knew that Athair could not yet trust him; not after his many failures and displays of doubt. But perhaps they were not in total disagreement—perhaps Jack Byrne _was_ a hired gun, for one of those wary political rivals…or for some member of the disgruntled populace with a few wits to his name…

If Maedhros is to serve, he cannot wholly profess the faith. If he is to do what he must, and learn the face beneath that unassuming bowler, he cannot believe that Melkor Bauglir is the hand that winds fate.

To believe _that_ would be to open his mind to madness, his body to ruin, his family to death.


	2. what the anvil? what dread grasp

Maedhros rises early, in the hopes of catching Athair at his breakfast, but Athair is already gone. Maedhros, as usual, has no appetite. He takes a deck of cards and spreads them out at the table instead, scrutinizing his practicing fingers for any signs of stiffness.

He did not drink last night. As such, he scarcely slept. Now he practices his tricks and deals doggedly, reminding himself that five years of card-playing (as he has to his name) is not enough if weariness or nerves can easily wrest him from mastery.

“Maitimo,” says Maglor severely, when he trails in at half-past nine. Maglor’s engagements are all from tea-time onward, now; he can afford to sleep late. “You _did_ go to bed last night, did you not?”

“I did.”

“I only know that you are not lying because your hair is positively _wild_.” Maglor yawns into a be-silked elbow and comes round the end of the table. Maedhros does not put aside the cards, but he does twitch a little, touched by some warm emotion, as Maglor’s hands work into his tangled hair.

It is true: he has not combed it. He barely washed his face. He dressed so hastily, bent on an errand that came to no satisfying end.

“Athair left early again, did he?”

“Mm.” Maglor’s fingers separate the strands of a curl above Maedhros’ right ear. Mother still calls those, fondly, his baby curls. “He has much business to attend to.”

“Does he?” Maglor scoffs. “Really, with half our family estranged—or if not, no thanks to him—”

“Macalaure, it does no good to talk so. I’m glad to see him occupied.”

“But we don’t see him.”

A card slips from Maedhros’ hand. He swallows, picks it up again. He is nothing without his tricks.

“I know you two have been quarreling,” Maglor coaxes, in a voice that manages to be both achingly young and loftily superior at the same time. “Maitimo…”

“He is grieving. We are all grieving.”

_And we are not safe._

Even with daylight streaming through the windows—

Maglor gathers his hair back and ties it off with a ribbon that he has procured from Lord knows where. “There,” he says. “It is just long enough to make you look like—like Paul Revere.”

Maedhros laughs at that, despite his dread. Maglor is no great student to _recent_ history, ever preferring the classics, but the name of Revere sticks in his memory because of a shared legacy of silversmithing.

“You do not flatter me,” Maedhros replies, bridging his deck. “I have seen the Stuart portrait!”

Maglor laughs in turn. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Forgive me for offending your vanity. Now, are we going to have a little breakfast? I’m starved…and I know you haven’t eaten, sitting here with spades and diamonds aplenty.”

Over breakfast, it seems absurd to even think of mentioning the footsteps, the hat, the invisible gaze at Bernard’s. Maglor is in a jovial mood. He has glowing reports to share of his performance the night prior, and Maedhros listens, grateful that he himself need not speak.

“Too heavy for your liking?” Maglor asks, frowning at the untouched ham on Maedhros’ plate. Before Maedhros can protest, he rings the bell. “We’ll call for a little fruit. Some of those apple turnovers you like.”

Maglor is more than cheerful; he is attentive. Ordinarily, Maedhros would expect such keen glances to be shaded by worry, but his brother’s good humor leads only to an offer for a round of cards.

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, of course,” Maglor says, fanning out his hand and squinting at the selection displayed there with a focus that resembles Athair’s. “You know, when I attend parties, I play in one way and not the other.”

“Was it…a ball, last night?”

“Not quite a ball. Only five couple.”

Maedhros cannot reveal Athair’s furtive arrangements by further questions. Even if Maglor was ignorant of one purpose, he dislikes being pestered, and so Maedhros lays down his bid instead.

They are halfway through their round when the cook enters with a bright-tinted assortment of oranges, figs, and minced apples. Maedhros thanks her, and finds himself more favorably disposed to these than to the ham.

“You are like a little bird,” Maglor teases, watching him eat with his chin on his hand. “A little bird in a great frame. Why could _I_ not have grown taller? Damn it all, I am such a prawn beside you.”

“Say rather, I am a giant! There is nothing fashionable about it. And you would have had to customize your instruments.”

“But I have already. Athair never let me play anything that could be bought off of a shelf.” Maglor’s lip curls. “Well, I did play Indis’ harp a few times. Not like the _clairséach_ at all, whatever people may call it in idiom. But I liked that harp. She has invited me to tea; perhaps I shall play it again then.”

“She has invited you to tea?” Maedhros nearly loses his cards again. He must check this; this involuntary shuddering. He must train himself out of it, reflexive or not. Athair trained him from mumbling, after all, and from a dozen other youthful vices. Harsh methods generally prove to be most effective.

“Yes.” Maglor tilts his head and speaks softly but not timidly. Indeed, there is a little glint of defiance in his eye. “She is all alone in that grand house, you know. And our cousins make for dull company. We have exchanged a few notes, since”—scarcely a pause—“the funeral. She always asks after you.”

Maedhros does not know what to say to that. He stares at the knave of hearts, pinned between finger and thumb.

Maglor opens his mouth, but it is impossible to guess whether _he_ would have been bold enough to speak longer of Indis in their father’s house, for the tread in the hall outside suggests that their father is home.

If he were still playing alone, Maedhros would hide the cards at once. Athair has never vouched an opinion on the subject, but Maedhros is ashamed to be caught practicing at something as surely facile to Athair’s eyes as a game.

“Still at breakfast?” Athair asks. There is soot smeared along his jaw.

Maedhros kicks his chair back. “You’re right,” he says. “It’s getting late. I hope you had success in your morning ventures?”

Maglor drops his hand of cards from too great a height, so that several flutter to the ground.

“Are you _quite_ well, Maglor?” Athair asks, his gaze sharpening still further.

“I was out very late,” Maglor says. “And as such have only risen within the hour. Maedhros was kind enough to keep me company.”

Athair’s voice is tipped with venom. “I should not dream of intruding on your repast,” he says. “I will be in my study.”

Maedhros sighs.

Maglor sighs even more heavily. “He’s out of his head, Maitimo. Surely you can see that?” This, very low indeed, and only after the study door has closed firmly.

“It has only been a few months,” Maedhros answers. He bites his lip, worrying a sore spot at the corner. “Please…try not to provoke him.”

But such words, of course, only provoke Maglor.

“It is not _I_ who contrive to spoil every meal I attend—and some I do not.” Maglor rings the bell violently, with a fretful flourish of his dressing gown sleeve. “And I’ve lost you, too, haven’t I?”

“What?”

“You’ll slink in there and beg pardon.”

“Maglor—”

“Whatever he’s put you up to, I’m not blind,” Maglor says sharply, and then, seeming startled by his own brass, he draws back. “No matter—no matter. Maitimo, _he_ wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. Grandfather, I mean. He wouldn’t want to be unhappy for anything.”

“I know,” Maedhros whispers.

“ _I_ am meant to be melancholy,” Maglor adds, reflectively. “It is a poet’s burden. Ah, well. I’m going to go and compose. Screech the fiddle-bow a floor above Athair’s head.”

“Pray, don’t.”

“I’m only _joking_.”

When Maglor is safely upstairs, Maedhros knocks at the door of the study, and is relieved when Athair’s voice, weary rather than sharp, bids him enter.

“Well?” Athair demands. He has a sheaf of papers spread over his desk, and he does not raise his eyes to follow his question. Some of the papers are scrawled over in his hand; others are not, but Maedhros cannot read even those that are, for they are written in what Athair calls _Tengwar_. That is his own code, which he shares with no one—not even Maedhros.

“I have a thread to follow,” Maedhros says. Athair does not offer him a seat and so he does not take one. “Well—not a thread. A man. I felt as if I was being watched too closely, yesterday.”

Athair glances up, at this. “A man.”

“At Bernard’s—a gentleman’s club.”

“Did he look familiar to you?”

“No—utterly unassuming. He wore a hat indoors, though, which seemed strange to me. And he followed me.”

“No doubt to hide his face, though in the end, he drew only attention to it.” Athair shakes his head. “That suggests a lack of skill, perhaps.”

Maedhros thinks, almost hopefully, that Athair has never attributed a lack of skill to—to Bauglir, but he dares not say as much aloud.

“I though it would be wise to return to the same place today, seeming unawares, and see if he is there again.”

“You go there frequently?”

Maedhros heard no accusation in the question, but he is still a little awkward as he says, “Yes, sir.”

Athair ruminates for a long, silent moment. His bright eyes track an invisible path reaching every corner of the room. There are worlds in Athair’s eyes. Maedhros used to believe that age would teach him to see them, too.

“It is as good a plan as any,” Athair murmurs.

There are ghosts in the room with them, or maybe just the one.

(Maedhros can see Finwe everywhere, except when he tries to remember him. Then, it is like looking at the sun.)

The bowler hat reappears at Bernard’s, but as soon as he sees it, Maedhros departs. He makes first for the coatroom, to exchange his neat double-breasted model for a shabby one, and then he sets out for a far deadlier meeting place than the club—the Old Brewery in Five Points.

Jack Byrne was seen there often, and Maedhros, pretending ambition and craving bitter irony, considers that it may be the site of his own doom.

He _might_ die here. They say there’s a murder a night, within the Brewery’s walls.

The street smells are viciously foul. If he _had_ eaten much, this day, he would be soon sick. The horses that race over mud-slurried cobbles are wild-eyed and underfed. No respected carriage would pass through these streets except out of necessity. It is as likely as the head or tail of a tossed coin that even necessity would see one picked clean of pocket.

Despite such ominous portents, Maedhros walked here, to be sure that his hunter could properly trail him.

He is satisfied that the bowler hat is bobbing along amidst the drunk-limping, low-mumbling crowds that weave beneath the grainy glare of the occasional coach lantern. Thus satisfied, and slipping inside the doors of the Old Brewery itself—narrowly dodging a river of offal tossed from one of the tenements above—Maedhros finds himself with nothing to do but wait.

What is his plan, exactly?

And why here, in real danger and without a friend in possible reach, does grief rise with new fury?

Perhaps it is because he once was used to walking poorer streets when, nigh on two years ago, he still courted a woman whom his whole heart could love.

What if he had done as Athair asked? What if he had taken a seat on the Council—but no, it could have brought no happiness, no stability or comfort, save that the bullet meant for Grandfather might have been his end instead.

If Athair is right, and it is Bauglir whose black-pitted eyes peer out of every shaded window, every moonlit street, if it is his hands (great, white hands that Maedhros can never forget, despite his brief acquaintance with them) that stretch to cover and throttle the line of Finwe—

 _I would be dead, instead. He would have killed me, to hurt Athair. A son, rather than a father. Oh, that it were so! But no—I cannot bear for_ him _—_

In his musings—in his sudden shock—he has forgotten to keep an eye on his pursuer. A fatal mistake, really, for this evening’s risky plan. The man is entirely gone. Scrambling, Maedhros orders one drink, then another, choosing the most cunning vantage points from which to quaff his growing thirst. To no avail. At two o’clock in the morning, by the telling of his pocketwatch, he gives the thing up as a failure.

To stumble home with a buzzing head from Five Points is not a path that a gentleman should take. Maedhros tries to lurch a little, to hunch his shoulders, to not walk as if he has studied fencing above bricklaying. Afterwards he must credit his mother’s prayers or a distant angel for his safe traversal north and west.

He squanders such prayers a quarter of an hour later, of course, but that is his way.

(When Maedhros sleeps, his dreams are not ordinary creatures. He sees too many painted futures, red and lonely, Athair and brothers, gaunt and weary and so very afraid. He cannot see Mother, or Fingon, or the known places that have tormented him and succored him by turns.

He cannot, what is more, see himself.)

The girl calls to him from a doorway, her voice lilting in an almost homely fashion. It is, at least, enough to put a hitch in his step, and _that_ is enough for him to stop altogether, for even if he kept on, she would know him to be caught.

“You look lonely, _a ghrá_ ,” she says.

“I’m in a hurry,” he answers, though he is already counting the coins in his purse. The night is wasted. Nothing noble is within him; nothing noble has ever been accomplished by his kind of misery. But the sight of her, the thought of what she can give, sets the blood pounding in his head. That blood unsplit blurs both vision and thought enough to forget, in a moment’s weary-woven lie, what guilt and sorrow _are_.

She tilts her head, all business once she trusts that he is. “I’ll take you in the alley, there, if you don’t mind.”

He has but a second to consider. Old habits, though he cultivated them best in pretty chambers, beribboned and perfumed, die just the same as he does—which is to say, slowly and foolishly. Scraped to its plain frame, the prospect is sordid but no less tempting. He feels his face turning, likely, as red as his hair.

Then he follows her, down into darkness, his back to the wall.

As a boy, he thought himself destined for sainthood, not because of any particular virtue on his part, but because children are formed to be overactive in conscience and overreaching in hope.

Too many points of light converge, strengthened tenfold by the sudden radiance of the moon slipped from its gown of cloud. From the corner of a distracted eye, Maedhros sees the familiar figure, half shaped at the mouth of the alley. In a frantic burst, he begs the girl off him. She gives way without too much displeasure, given that he empties his coin-purse into her hands, and all told, he makes what haste he can.

It turns out that he does not need to. The spy does not disappear this time.

Instead, he stands with his hat tipped down, and chuckles as he speaks.

“You have a strange way of minding your tail, Master Feanorian.”

“Who are you?” Maedhros asks. He has a small piece with him, concealed in his breast pocket, but in his state of disarray and surprise, he does not have it handy. It will do him little good if this fellow is ready with _his_ gun.

“Friend of a friend,” the man says. He lifts his hat a little, and Maedhros can see a broad, bearded face. “So to speak. Now, what’ll you give me to tell you my business? Perhaps I should settle for a little of what you were enjoying, a moment ago. Can’t promise I’ll stroke your hair as tenderly as you did hers—”

Maedhros flings himself at him. There is no wisdom in this; there is no reason. Neither of these are left in _him._

There in the moon-drenched darkness falls Grandfather, his kindly old head in pieces, and there falls Athair, a frightful shell of all that he was, and there _rises_ fear, before both these terrible ruins. Fear before sin; before the knowledge of others’ righteousness.

Fear in the winter, fear in the spring, fear in the forge.

Maedhros, if he is anything, is a soul grown weary of hating itself. Yet, what is that hatred but his sole lasting inheritance? It grows, flourishing, and his hands tend it faithfully.

( _If your right hand sins against you_ , says the Word, _cut it off_.)

The man has a knife, not a gun. Maedhros twists it from his grasp; it clatters to the cobbles.

“Tell me who you are! Are you one of Byrne’s handlers?”

“Byrne?”

“Jack Byrne! Drunken fuck—that killed—my grandfather!” He has the man firmly by the throat; he shakes him with each burst of speech.

Gloved hands beat against his forearm.

“Mercy—mercy—”

Maedhros releases him, but the man, upon catching his breath, uses it only to laugh again.

“You think I’m a killer, do you?” he wheezes. “Think I’ve come to finish you off.”

“I think you’re enterprising,” Maedhros spits. “And low as scum.”

“Speak for yourself, _Feanorian_.”

With the knife on the pavement, Maedhros has time and confidence enough to reach for his gun. He thrusts the spy away and steps back, training his aim at eye-level. “Tell me what you know.”

“I know you drink like a fish,” the man says. “It’ll kill you, you know. From what I hear, you’re a Papist, too—haven’t they a thing or to say about letting a harlot—”

He had thought the man’s earlier jibe to be nothing more than rough jest. “What does that matter? We’re not among angels, here.”

“Scandal is scandal,” the man shrugs. “My buyer pays me for anything he can have on Feanor’s heir.”

“Your buyer.” He doesn’t understand.

“I called him your friend, didn’t I? But there’s naught to it. He isn’t paying for my funeral. I’ll be straight with you, young master. Your uncle’s the one paying for word of you.”

A new fear, and it tears the air from Maedhros’ lungs. “ _Fingolfin?_ ” 


	3. did he smile his work to see?

“That’s the very one,” the man says. “I’ll not die for him willingly. But would you really kill me in cold blood, just to keep your filthy secrets?”

Maedhros does not lower his weapon. Not yet.

“If you were going to shoot me, boy, you’d have done it already.”

It’s true. He doesn’t—he doesn’t have it in him, to _kill_ a man. Even a man such as this.

Fingolfin—

_Oh, God. You swore. And you broke that promise—how many times over, now—_

_No harm shall come to Fingon because of me._

He chokes on his breath. The man laughs again. Maedhros, if he _could_ kill, would kill him for laughing.

“There now. Why don’t we part as gentlemen? Or less than, if we’re truthful. I’ve kept my ear aground, rat-like, and you’re bandying with whores. How come it? Is it so lonely for you? Is it so lonely, boy?”

Maedhros growls, “Get out of my sight.”

“How shall I describe you to him? Will you pay me to keep the story slight?”

The gun trembles in his hand; he lowers it for that alone. It won’t do to hold it, shaking. And it won’t do to bargain, for he gave all his money to the girl, not even waiting for her to rise. He cannot give his watch—the only other thing of value he presently has on him. He’d die sooner than give up that watch, for something as low as this.

And it would only offer proof to Fingolfin.

( _Oh, Uncle. Must you hate me more?_ )

“Loose of purse as well as morals,” the man muses. “All right, then. What’s your offer?”

“Your life.”

“But you’re afraid.” The man takes a step closer, so that Maedhros cannot easily avoid his shadowed gaze. “You’ll not kill me, and you’ve nothing to give.”

With effort, Maedhros says, “You’ve nothing to tell him that he doesn’t know already.” 

“Ah, but I’m a man paid for details, and I’ve watched you for weeks. Not so proud a critter, are you, when you think yourself alone. Most men, they _stay_ men. But you’re young yet, and already going soft and mad.” He shakes his head, rolling his hat between his hands. “I’ll be off, then. Mercy for mercy: no need to get to your knees.”

With that, he disappears between the teeth of lanterns. Maedhros makes no move to follow him. Indeed, he stands still as a tombstone, until when another voice makes him start like a prey-beast.

“You spake ill o’ Byrne?”

Maedhros turns on his heel. He can see two figures, but little else, what light there is, is behind him. He does not reach for his gun; it would do him no good since he knows he cannot bring himself to fire it.

Nor does he run when they rush him, though he does fight.

They are hard street-brawlers, and they intend to beat him soundly, if not to kill him outright. Maedhros gets his licks in. A few drinks aren’t enough to throw him off his feet. But at last his head rings with a blow to the temple, and he goes down.

They’ll kill him now.

In the year before he died, Finwe looked tired. Seeing one son take up arms against another had torn a little life from him before the bullet did. Maedhros had been frightened by even the unconscious knowledge of this; he had withdrawn from some of their old intimacy.

As such, he lost what time they had.

They are on him without reprieve, until they are gone—

“Coppers! Run!” calls one or the other, it matters not which. And just so, Maedhros is free; living yet without broken bones or ruined features. His head hurts. He is lying, winded, in the alley muck.

That is all.

God help him—God hate him. He wishes they’d done what they set out to do.

“Not so proud now, are ye, _a ghrá_?”

He cannot see her, his eyes are not quite right. He heaves a shocked breath, though, when she kicks at his sore ribs.

“You think yourself so high-and-mighty just because you’re gentle with the girls who tiff you. But all the gold in the world won’t make me less a whore, will it? Not in your eyes. You just pour it out for pity’s sake. Aye, I know your lot. You pant and twist the same as other men.”

She aims for his head this time, but he’s gathered his sorry wits enough to dodge, to pull himself up and out of her reach.

“Byrne was one of ours,” she says, scuttling back at the sight of his recovery. And then, as she runs off altogether, she screams, “I’m glad he killed your Limey-loving grandfather, iffen he did it!”

Maedhros cannot stand, for a sudden bout of weeping, but the heavens and the netherworld both are closed against him.

No one else comes to take his life.

He strips off the coat and discards it long before he reaches Valinor Park. It is four or five in the morning; no coach would take him, and he wound about a fair amount. His brains, it seems, are still quite addled.

“Maedhros?”

So much light, so much true and pale candlelight, as the door is flung open before him. Athair is before him.

(Athair before everything.)

Maedhros offers himself, hoarsely saying, “Athair, I—”

“Good Lord,” Athair exclaims. “Good God in Heaven. What has happened to you? Who has—”

“A mistake,” Maedhros answers. It is only September, it is not _really_ cold, but his teeth are chattering. “A mistake—and then another—”

“Never mind that, for now,” Athair says crisply. “Here—well, here, let us go to the kitchen pump. Your mother would scold from afar if she knew we had dragged filth like this indoors. Come, come. Jesus. Good Jesus.”

The kitchen pump does not have a full yard about it as at Formenos; it is half-hidden in a low, three-sided waterhouse. Maedhros strips off his shirt, his bruises already stiff, and crouches beneath the pump with his arms around his knees.

“Nonsense,” Athair is saying, loud over the rush of the water. “Stuff and nonsense.” But he does not sound really angry, only confused, as if he is puzzling something out.

The water is icy. Maedhros buries his face against his arms. If he weeps again, he does not want Athair to see. (He weeps again.)

Athair offers him a horse blanket to cover himself—Maedhros peels away his ruined trousers, too, when the washing is done—and then in a tragicomic parade they slip back into the house.

“You’re bleeding,” Athair murmurs in the front hall, his brows poised like uneasy wings. His hand flies instead, rising to Maedhros’ temple, but drawing away a second later, without touching. “Clean yourself in the washroom, then march straight back.”

Maedhros nods meekly, and drips his way to the stairs.

He studies himself in the looking glass, before and after he scrubs his body clean. He shall have some ugly bruising along his ribs and on one shoulder, and he has the fine beginnings of a black eye. The cut at his temple has bled a good deal. His hair, even when washed, is madly untidy.

It is all rather fitting, for a dashed soul and a fruitless mission.

Athair has a steaming kettle, a needle and waxed thread, and several neat bandages waiting when Maedhros returns, dressed in a nightshirt shirt and loose breeches.

“Sit down there,” Athair commands. He has a lantern of his own make—capable of throwing strong light—set on one of the kitchen shelves.

Maedhros takes his seat and submits to Athair smoothing back the hair at his temple. He wants to ask if it really shall require stitches, but he does not trust his voice yet.

In the end, Athair makes two swift passes with the needle. Maedhros’ bare feet curl against the cool flagstones; his breath hitches—but he makes not a sound.

“Fingon suggested waxing the thread,” Athair muses. “But I believe I perfected the mixture.”

 _Fingon. Fingolfin_. Maedhros must descend rapidly into the hell-pit of recent memory to decide, with much remorse but without a new betrayal, that Athair need not hear of what was said in the alley.

Athair has long believed that his half-brother hunts for him…seeks to ruin him. Maedhros, in a weary failure of loyalty, cannot quite own it to be so. History has punished him for that, but he holds fast.

For it is, after all, _Maedhros_ whom Fingolfin hunts—and for good reason. Fingolfin’s quarry is a nephew’s sins because that nephew has a love of one virtue.

One cousin.

Maedhros’ sins form the only subject in the world that truly has nothing to do with Athair. He sighs.

“Who is to blame for this?” Athair demands, quiet and deadly.

“I am.”

A pause, no less deadly, as far as Maedhros is concerned.

“I mean,” he says, “I mistook a man for one of—for a spy on account of Grandfather. I was wrong. But I tangled with the Five Points crowd, and some of—of Byrne’s friends more particularly—”

“They did not speak of Bauglir?”

_Same as other men._

“No, Athair.”

“For my part,” Athair says, running diligent fingers through Maedhros’ hair—workman’s fingers, disconnected from his thoughts, for his eyes are far away—”I have narrowed the number of houses he may be letting to five. I shall have to investigate further.”

Maedhros does not want to think of Bauglir. He does not wince when Athair’s ring catches against a snarl. He sits very still.

But of course Athair is restless when he is thinking and his hands stray from Maedhros’ hair before long. Then he paces the kitchen, and talks of his latest suspicions: that Bauglir has continued his pretense of reform and repentance, that he will appear to have retired from public life…

“Until he is drawn back into, feigning reluctance at every step,” he concludes with a sneer. Then he stops mid-step. “Ah! Yes. Here, you had better have a little tea, before the water I boiled grows cold.”

Maedhros drinks his tea. Athair bids him to bed thereafter, and Maedhros expects to climb the stairs alone, but Athair follows, lowering his chatter to a whisper.

“The wound is not deep enough to be dangerous, but I shall wake you early nonetheless. One should not sleep long after a blow to the head.”

Maglor is quite appalled at breakfast.

Fingolfin is quite polite at Sunday Mass.

(Athair has departed, by then.)

“Good day to you,” Fingolfin says gravely. “Maedhros. Maglor.”

There is no malice in his gaze. But is there knowledge? Knowledge of darkness, here in the stained-glass light?

Maglor offers an ordinary greeting. Maedhros bows, but speaks no word. If the man was lying—the man with his greed and laughter and his certainty that Maedhros would not shoot—

But no. Whatever other truths there may be, one remains in Maedhros’ easy grasp: Fingolfin does not trust him.

And nothing could be more properly his right.

***

A man in a plain coat, with a plain face, with a plain bowler hat tucked under his arm, entered the church but did not bless himself. The place was empty, though the red light burned.

On quiet feet, he crossed to the curtained confessional box, which was carved and fluted like the side of a ship. There, he entered into velvet darkness.

“ _Pater noster_ ,” he said. “ _Pater noster_ , _pater noster_.”

“Good evening, Gibson.”

How disembodied, that voice. How rich and full, and yet, because it had no form, it was made shapeless and fluid itself.

Gibson had never heard it from a visible mouth; he still wondered, at times, why he was permitted to hear it at all. Twice, now, he had visited it in this sacred den. And twice he had had to satisfy himself with guesses.

“He made me, sir.”

“And?”

“I told him I was with Fingolfin, just as I should.”

“Very well. And how did he take _that_ news?”

“Oh, very badly, sir. He was right shaken, he was. White-faced and begging, even though _he_ was the one with a gun. Now this was after I caught him with a fancy lady, you see—”

“Start from the beginning, Gibson. And do not spare a word.”


End file.
